


trinkets and odd notions

by Ancalime



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:55:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8889850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ancalime/pseuds/Ancalime
Summary: "Me? I learned long ago you gotta play the hand you're dealt. So, here's a little bit of what I remember. Strike that.Here's a little bit of what I know. It ain't all right, but I'll be damned if it ain't the truth."





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [virusq](https://archiveofourown.org/users/virusq/gifts).



> Snippets from the life of the Hunter Vanguard we know as Cayde-6. (Heavily influenced by the journal that came with the Taken King box set.)

I:

What they don't tell you is that it _is_ like being reborn, in all the worst ways.

You wake up in the ice and the metal, cold all around you, _inside_ you, and you know -- everything _must_ be different, though you can't quite feel how. But in some ways it's just like any other job. You're the low man on the totem pole from the day your new eyes open.

A design flaw: humans don't have numbers attached to their names to tell you how many times they've reinvented themselves, how many different versions of themselves they could isolate and identify if they cast their minds back over their lives. After the fact, it's hard to imagine -- if you had to pick a number for your biological life to delineate where one version of yourself ended and another began, what would that number be? If you compared that first self to the most recent version, how vastly different would the two be?

As an Exo it's practically the first thing you learn about someone. It's right there in the name. _Cayde-1_.

No matter who someone was before, what baggage and qualifications they brought with themselves, any One is a greenhorn. The rawest of new recruits. No matter that the transition leaves you with control over your new body as fine as you ever had over the old one -- no matter that the longer you hang on to that One designation, the more you prove yourself capable -- so long as you've still got that "version 1" tag, you're still that first-release software, shiny and new and full of bugs.

 

II:

The lab is quiet, outside of Dr. Sundaresh's occasional murmured commentary to herself. You look at her and _marvel_ , that someone could contain such a spark of brilliance without a hint of it showing through to the untrained eye.

You've seen through her, in your time of service. Didn't take long, to be honest; you assume everyone sees through the quiet, polite veneer of Maya Sundaresh to the glittering, laser-like mind beneath in short order and that's exactly why her security details get rotated so often -- so nobody gets too attached.

You shift your weight. Strictly speaking, there's no _need_ for it; you're as capable of maximum performance and response from one stance as from the other. It's the humanity that transferred over that makes you uneasy, keeps you from just standing in one place for your entire shift, still as a granite carving.

You've never spoken to Dr. Sundaresh, never even communicated beyond the standard salute -- _robotic_ , one might even say -- you give at shift change as you trade off with the previous guard and the next. But you still feel a connection with her, watching as she pores over the data, her hair glimmering in the harsh laboratory lights, her eyes the same frosty gray as the metal bulkheads, but-- warmer, somehow.

You shift and Dr. Sundaresh glances up at the motion, but otherwise doesn't so much as twitch a muscle, her eyes flicking back down to her terminal screen. To her, you've become -- you've _all_ become, the entire security detail has become -- as invisible and omnipresent as the bulkhead walls themselves. You might as well be a granite statue for all she recognizes your existence. Come to think of it, you're not sure any of the others have ever spoken to her, either. 

For all Dr. Sundaresh knows, her security detail is no more advanced than the biomechanical proxies that sit and wait for researchers to activate them and send them forth to work.

You shift your weight again, rotate your wrists and shrug your shoulders, just a twitch. Unearthing old muscle memories that no longer have the requisite bioelectrical processes to trigger, you cock one hip to the side, taking on what you recall of a swagger.

There's a flash of gray as Dr. Sundaresh's eyes flick up, and in them you think you see just a flicker of that same light that she focuses on the data endlessly pouring across her screen.

 

III:

When you were-- _before_ , you barely ever wrote anything by hand. A few scribbled notes here and there when you didn't have a tablet or terminal or phone handy, soon to be transferred to some digital format for preservation and easy access.

You catch a glimpse of one of the scientists writing, by hand, in an honest-to-goodness _paper notebook_ , and it sparks something in you. There's no need for any Exo to write anything down, but out of spite and stubbornness, you find yourself picking up pens and printed paper here and there, ordering old books to have practice material to work with. Older books are better -- there's more white space for writing practice -- and you develop a reputation as an aficionado. Little do they know you're spending time overriding your ingrained processes, careful and deliberate as you force your hand into curls and loops, inefficient swooping motions that stand against everything your onboard Exo programming feeds you.

Reading over your past journal entries, you examine the shapes of the letters more than the meaning of the words and notice certain consistencies across letters, an unnatural similarity to every shape. You spend three pages of precious paper differentiating your letters, forcing your fingers into irregularities as you write each y, each r, each doubled-letter combination. Only once you can scan each letter and confirm a certain percentage of variance between the forms do you move on.

 

IV:

 

 

> _Strike that. This is all wrong. Timeline's way off. Realigning..._

> _There's no bounty. No Hive. I'm out in plain sight. Sky is torn open and there's nothing and nobody lef tin this ruined world but me and the boiling shadow all around. Whatever it is hits me before I can level my gun. Doesn't matter. Tendrils of pain crawl over my splayed fingers, my outstretched arms, my shoulders, my neck, my screaming mouth as it consumes. I'm being enveloped. Everything is wrong, Primordial. My systems go sideways. All but my sensors. It wants me to witness this, the world. Its world now, suffocating in the black poison._
> 
> _I collapse._
> 
> _ We all collapse. _

 

V:

What you'll remember afterward is this: Andal Brask crouches behind cover less than two meters from you. You could reach out and touch him, if you wanted, if you risked dashing across the empty space Taniks' weapons are trained on. You could. It would be trivial, to touch him one more time before--

He fires off one more shot from cover, his sniper rifle coughing, and then he's out in the open, darting closer to where Taniks stands and laughs, that wave of bitter, dry humor that washes over the three of them. Taniks fires his own wire rifle, twice, and you have eternity to review the recorded footage after that. 

Two shots: one to the Guardian, one to the Ghost. 

Andal falls prone, all signs of life gone in an instant as the back of his skull spatters against rock, and normally you wouldn't care, would press the fight as his Ghost revived him, make a mental note to rib him about it later, but you hear the second humming report of the wire rifle, and something bursts at the perimeter of your sensors.

Following his master, Andal's Ghost explodes in a spray of metal and Light, and you feel something, violent and unexpected and raw, as the Light disperses, fragments of metal and glass falling to the lunar surface in near silence, the loose dust swallowing up the noise of their landing. Whatever it is, your third (a Titan that Andal knew better than you) feels it too, and _withdraws --_  an unheard-of behavior for Titans.

There's only so far the two of you can retreat, though, screaming at each other and calling for backup that will never come, and your recording of the day's events, when you review it after the wipe process, ends in a burst of static.

 

VI:

"Interestin' tech, Cayde." Amanda stops, coming to a halt to look at you with an all-too-knowing expression. "Isn't this Eris Morn's ship?"

"Is it? Huh." You let it wash over you. Whatever Eris decides, the dressing-down from Zavala and Ikora will be worth it. You hold out your hand, fingers spreading and curling as if you're caressing the ship Holliday's got the frames working on. "You know, you're a true artist -- can't even see the join."

"Cute. But Zavala's got signoff on all launches. Need to log why I'm letting it go." Amanda looks at you and you don't know how she manages to see through all the constructed layers, but she does. Her gaze pierces through you as you pick up a wrench to fiddle with and distract yourself.

"Stargazing tour?"

Amanda looks at you in rank disbelief, and your determination fades. She's the last one the old "stargazing tour" excuse would work on, and you both know it. You should have had something better prepared before you walked into the hangar. Holliday's been on enough "stargazing tours" herself; she of all people knows best what can -- and _can't_ \-- be sold under that banner.

You hold up the wrench and in an instant, options fluttering like flower petals, decide -- the truth. You flip the wrench in your hand, waving it in a pantomime of aggression. "Okay. How 'bout: an unsanctioned op, using modified stealth tech, to...infiltrate a dreadnaught above Saturn's rings, so we can knock out its weapons, create a transmat zone, and send in the cavalry?"

After a fraught moment where you're analyzing her microexpressions hundreds of times per second, Amanda takes the wrench out of your hand. "How 'bout a 'test flight?'"

She seems to have everything in hand, and you're not sure what else you can contribute, so you head off again, to draw Zavala and Ikora's attention away. "It'll be waitin' for you when you're ready."

"Me?!" Drawing up for a moment, you scoff, the archived recording of the Awoken fleet being wiped out running through your mind. "Oh, I'm not flying that thing."

 


End file.
